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207070 Sgt. Ronald Hubert Wilkinson British Army Royal Army Service Corps from:Redhill My father Ronald Wilkinson was in the RASC. He loved to talk about the war, but only selectively. He joined up a day or two before the War started in Redhill, Surrey, went to France with the British Expeditionary Force, and was posted missing at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. In fact, he returned home safely, some days later, from another port further to the west. I don't know which one. He didn't talk much about France, although I remember him telling me how a comrade once saw a pretty French girl walking by and announced, loudly, what he'd like to do to her, whereupon the girl turned around and said, in impeccable English, 'Would you really? How very interesting!'
In late 1942 he went to North Africa. He mentioned many, many times, such places as Tobruk, El Alamein, Mejez el Bab, Sid Birani, Mersa Metru, Biserta, etc. I know he was promoted, eventually to Sergeant. I'm not sure that he made any friends. In later life he certainly never met with anyone from the wartime period, but then he was a loner. From North Africa he went to Sicily, and made his way slowly north as the advance continued. He spoke many times of seeing Vesuvius erupt in 1944, and of visiting the ruins of Pompeii. After the war ended he was for a time in Milan. I only know that because he often spoke of visiting La Scala to see the opera. He came home by ship, crossing Biscay in a storm. His war years were, I suspect, the happiest of his life. He liked Army discipline and routine, he rarely saw action, and he enjoyed the rugged lifestyle - having been raised under a single mother's thumb. I would love to find out more about his experiences. When I was in my teens he occasionally let slip little details of a soldier's life. The outfit's first casualty was a dispatch rider who was caught by a shell fragment which sliced the top of his head off and scooped out his brains; he told me of the bar in a brothel where the guys (not him) took turns to visit a particularly attractive girl. He also told me many times about the aerial attack during which he fell to the ground, looked up and saw a bomb coming towards him. It struck the branch of a tree and was deflected. After the explosion he reached out and touched the side of the crater. Untill his death he used an ash-tray constructed from a shell base with a piece of shrapnel from that bomb soldered into it. He struggled to re-adjust to civilian life.
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